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Re: Joke thread... Proof that I'm insane

I'm not quite ready to let this thread die yet, and I found some good new ones:

Ten Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter

Rule One:
If you pull into my driveway and honk, you'd better be delivering a package,
because you're sure not picking anything up.

Rule Two:
You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long
as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes
or hands off of my daughter's body, I will remove them.

Rule Three:
I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear
their trousers so loosely that they appear to be falling off their hips.
Please don't take this as an insult, but you and all of your friends are
complete idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open minded about this issue,
so I propose his compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear
showing and your pants ten sizes too big, and I will not object.* However,
in order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the
course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and
fasten your trousers securely in place to your waist.

Rule Four:
I'm sure you've been told that in today's world, sex without utilizing a
&quot;barrier method&quot; of some kind can kill you.* Let me elaborate, when it comes
to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.

Rule Five:
It is usually understood that in order for us to get to know each other, we
should talk about sports, politics, and other issues of the day. Please do
not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of
when you expect to have my daughter safely back at my house, and the only
word I need from you on this subject is &quot;early.&quot;

Rule Six:
I have no doubt you are a popular fellow, with many opportunities to date
other girls. This is fine with me as long as it is okay with my daughter.
Otherwise, once you have gone out with my little girl, you will continue to
date no one but her until she is finished with you. If you make her cry, I
will make you cry.

Rule Seven:
As you stand in my front hallway, waiting for my daughter to appear, and
more than an hour goes by, do not sigh and fidget.* If you want to be on
time for the movie, you should not be dating.* My daughter is putting on her
makeup, a process that can take longer than painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
Instead of just standing there, why don't you do something useful, like
changing the oil in my car?

Rule Eight:
The following places are not appropriate for a date with my daughter: Places
where there are beds, sofas, or anything softer than a wooden stool.* Places
where there are no parents, policemen, or nuns within eyesight.* Places
where there is darkness.* Places where there is dancing, holding hands, or
happiness.* Places where the ambient temperature is warm enough to induce my
daughter to wear shorts, tank tops, midriff T-shirts, or anything other than
overalls, a sweater, and a goose down parka - zipped up to her throat.
Movies with a strong romantic or sexual theme are to be avoided; movies
which features chain saws are okay. Hockey games are okay. Old folks homes
are better.

Rule Nine:
Do not lie to me. I may appear to be a potbellied, balding, middle-aged,
dimwitted has-been. But on issues relating to my daughter, I am the
all-knowing, merciless god of your universe.* If I ask you where you are
going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth.* I have a shotgun, a shovel, and five acres
behind the house. Do not trifle with me.

Rule Ten:
Be afraid.* Be very afraid.* It takes very little for me to mistake the
sound of your car in the driveway for a chopper coming in over a rice paddy
near Hanoi.* When my Agent Orange starts acting up, the voices in my head
frequently tell me to clean the guns as I wait for you to bring my daughter
home. As soon as you pull into the driveway you should exit your car with
both hands in plain sight. Speak the perimeter password, announce in a clear
voice that you have brought my daughter home safely and early, then return
to your car - there is no need for you to come inside.* The camouflaged face
at the window is mine.

Re: Joke thread... Proof that I'm insane

Things You Learn From the Movies:
1. Large, loft-style apartments in New York City are well within the price range of most people-whether they are employed or not.
2. At least one of a pair of identical twins is born evil.
3. Should you decide to defuse a bomb, don't worry which wire to cut. You will always choose the right one.
4. Most laptop computers are powerful enough to override the communications system of any invading alien society.
5. It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts: your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessors.
6. When you turn out the light to go to bed, everything in your bedroom will still be clearly visible, just slightly bluish.
7. If you are blonde and pretty, it is possible to become a world expert on nuclear fission at the age of 22.
8. Honest and hard working policemen are traditionally gunned down three days before their retirement.
9. Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their arch enemies using complicated machinery involving fuses, pulley systems, deadly gasses, lasers, and man-eating sharks, which will allow their captives at least 20 minutes to escape.
10. All beds have special L-shaped cover sheets that reach the armpit level on a woman but only to waist level on the man lying beside her.
11. All grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread.
12. It's easy for anyone to land a plane providing there is someone in the control tower to talk you down.
13. Once applied, lipstick will never rub off-even while scuba diving.
14. You're very likely to survive any battle in any war unless you make the mistake of showing someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.
15. Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German or Russian officer, it will not be necessary to speak the language. A German or Russian accent will do.
16. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window in Paris.
17. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating, but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.
18. If a large pane of glass is visible, someone will be thrown through it before long.
19. If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises in their most revealing underwear.
20. Word processors never display a cursor on screen but will always say: Enter Password Now.
21. Even when driving down a perfectly straight road, it is necessary to turn the steering wheel vigorously from left to right every few moments.
22. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts so you know exactly when they're going to go off.
23. A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.
24. If you decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you meet will know all the steps.
25. Police departments give their officers personality tests to make sure they are deliberately assigned a partner who is their total opposite.
26. When they are alone, all foreign military officers prefer to speak to each other in English.

Re: Joke thread... Proof that I'm insane

THE DRINKERS FAULT FINDING GUIDE
Symptom: Drinking fails to give satisfaction and taste. Shirt is wet.
Fault: Mouth not open when drinking, or glass being applied to wrong part of face.
Solution: Buy another pint and practice in front of mirror, continue with as many pints as necessary until drinking technique is perfect.

Symptom: Drinking fails to give satisfaction and taste, beer unusually pale and clear.
Fault: Glass is empty.
Solution: Find someone who will buy you another pint.

Symptom: Feet cold and wet.
Fault: Glass being held at incorrect angle .
Solution: Turn glass so that open end is pointing towards the ceiling.

Symptom: Feet warm and wet.
Fault: Loss of self control.
Solution: Go and stand beside nearest dog, after a while complain to its owner about its lack of house training.

Symptom: Lap cold and wet.
Fault: Drooling on yourself.
Solution: Change position so that you are drooling on somebody else.

Symptom: Bar blurred.
Fault: You are looking through the bottom of your empty glass.
Solution: Find someone who will buy another pint.

Symptom: Bar moving.
Fault: You are being carried out.
Solution: Find out whether you are being taken to another bar, if not complain loudly that you are being hi-jacked.

Symptom: Bar looks like a circus.
Fault: You're at a circus.
Solution: Go to a bar.

Symptom: The opposite wall is covered with ceiling tiles and has a fluorescent strip across it.
Fault: You have fallen backwards.
Solution: If glass is still full and no-one is standing on your drinking arm, stay out, if not get someone to help you up and lash you to the bar.

Symptom: Everything has gone dim and you have a mouth full of teeth and dog hairs
Fault: You have fallen forwards.
Solution: Do the same as for falling backwards

Symptom: You have woken up to find your bed cold, hard, and wet, you can't see your bedroom walls or ceiling.
Fault: You have spent the night in the gutter.
Solution: Check your watch to see if its opening time - if not treat yourself to a lie in .

Re: Joke thread... Proof that I'm insane

Re: Joke thread... Proof that I'm insane

Other signs to look for:

Deviant musical tastes.
Marilyn Manson and &quot;industrial&quot; electronic music are the current chief suspects, but Judas Priest, Deep Purple, AC/DC, The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry have not yet been exonerated. Anything sung in German to a heavy beat sounds like a Hitler Youth recruiting song, which means it probably is.

Drug use.
Excludes alcohol and tobacco, unless the suspect is over the age of 18 (or 21 in some jurisdictions). In some communities, use of alcohol, tobacco or caffeine is always evil. Check your local regulations.

Internet use.
Internet access permits disturbed individuals to find recipes for bombs and poisons. Restricting Net access only to persons over the age of 90 and kept under constant armed guard will drive other persons seeking this subversive information to actually visit public libraries, in which they can be trapped and burned.

Pornography.
Erotic books, videos and computer files are obviously associated with murderous rampages. Name one mass murderer that didn't masturbate.

Quietness.
For safety's sake, whenever you see anybody of whom it could be said &quot;he was a quiet man&quot;, perform a Citizen's Arrest at once.

Strong interest in war and/or firearms.
90% of teenage boys should, for this reason, be incarcerated immediately.

Mood swings and depression.
We'd better make that 100% of all teenagers, regardless of gender.

Sympathy for offenders.
Any student who admits to understanding how people who have been bullied might rather like to shoot the bullies is probably about to run amok.

Possession of weapons.
Any weapons. Remember, pocketknives don't kill people - people who own pocketknives kill people.

Belief in evolution.
It is well known that evolution requires atheism, and that all atheists are amoral creatures, many of whom eat human flesh.

&quot;Goth&quot; tendencies.
A teenager with an interest in fastidious dressing is clearly deeply aberrant. Note, however, that some particularly flamboyant apparent Goths may in fact be science fiction geeks dressed up as Centauri noblemen. Since no science fiction geek has yet killed a load of people, the plastic battery-powered phaser is not yet considered to be dangerous.

Disrespect for authority.
Today's youth should be as morally upright as are the leaders of the free world, and should never consider violence as a way of settling disputes, regardless of provocation, any more than NATO does.

Re: Joke thread... Proof that I'm insane

Black Computers Faster - It's Official!

Confirming the suspicions of computer makers and users down the years (largely unvoiced for fear of public ridicule), a new study has confirmed that colour is a powerful factor in computer performance.
One of the most closely guarded secrets of high performance computer manufacturers is that a simple change in the colour of a computer's case, from the regulation beige to jet black, has a significant impact on the performance results. Both ordinary instruction per second and floating point results show a boost from 7 to 16 per cent, with graphics performance following suit.

This is not news to anyone involved with high-powered machines. Think about it. If you've ever been in a room full of fast workstations, how many of them are beige? The NeXT might not have been very popular, but it was certainly fast, and what colour was it? Matte black. What colour's the monster machine that sends this magazine's pages to the imagesetter? Black, naturally. What's the favourite case colour for laptop manufacturers always trying to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of their miniaturised creations? Black. What colour was the Sinclair ZX81? Black. Well, three out of four ain't bad.

New study
Dr. Amanda Butts, from the Nimbin-based Centre for Applied Pharmaceutical Research, recently released a research paper on the subject. In controlled tests where 30 computers ran benchmarks for one week, 10 with beige cases, 10 with black cases and 10 with no cases at all, the black computers consistently beat the beige ones and the caseless machines' results oscillated around the beige machines' scores.

&quot;Modern computing,&quot; said Dr. Butts, &quot;has long since passed the point where individual bits of storage or operations per second of processor speed make any difference. In the olden days, when a fast processor did 500 operations per second and a kilobyte was a lot of RAM, case colour was an undetectably small factor in computer performance. The fact that older computers were often built in open plan racks, homebuilt cases or other peculiar enclosures contributed to the paucity of real data on case colour effects - in the absence of a case, a user with a black T-shirt on could have had some effect but probably not enough to measure.

&quot;Let's face it, there just wasn't enough to work with.

&quot;But these days hard drives run to hundreds of megabytes, procesors do scores of millions of instructions per second and eight or more megabytes of RAM is common.&quot;

The most logical explanation for the DCC (Dark Case Colouring) effect relates to the well-accepted effects of computrons, the elementary quanta of information. Molecules in a solid object move more rapidly when heated, and, eventually, the object melts. The melting is caused by the loss of computrons, driven off by the heat; without the computrons and their information on atomic matrix location, the atoms don't &quot;know&quot; where they're meant to be. This is why computers need fans, and big computers need air-conditioned rooms; if they were allowed to get too hot they'd lose computrons and stop working (they'd never actually melt, though; once the computrons start to boil off, the computer shuts down). The use of computron beams for cooling, or the imposition of order on chaotic systems is still in the experimental stage.

Interestingly, it appears that the benefits of DCC are largely directed at Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) hardware - processors like the Intel 80x86 series and the Motorola 680x0. Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) chips like the Digital Equipment Corporation Alphas used in Silicon Graphics workstations have been demonstrated to benefit more from pastel shades, particularly mauve. It could be that processor complexity is directly linked to the spectral position of the ideal case colour; the RISC chips' comparatively simple architecture puts them at the top (violet) end of the visible spectrum, whereas the CISC chips' greater detail pushes them right off the top of the visible range into the ultraviolet (UV) and beyond - which, of course, appears to the naked eye to be black.

Spectrograph analysis of the radiated energy from black CISC computers will of course prove or disprove this hypothesis, but it raises some other important questions - can UV radiation be implicated in the reported incidents of dangerous radiation emissions for computers, and could a UV-emissive coating applied to a standard beige or other coloured case provide the accelerative properties of a black case to users of other machines?

Re: Joke thread... Proof that I'm insane

It's also interesting that the complexity-modulated DCC hypothesis appears to hold even in the case of mechanical equipment - for example automobiles. Compared with even a RISC CPU, a car is a very simple system - larger and more varied, but with a simpler schematic, even if you take into account the low-powered processors in modern engine management systems. This means the ideal colour for a car would have to be lower in the spectrum than the ideal colour for a computer - probably quite a bit lower, right down at the red end. And we all know red cars go faster!

What you can do
It's clear that DCC is a real, measurable phenomenon, and every computer user will naturally want to take advantage of it. So what should you do?

Well, spraypainting your existing computer's case will help, as long as you spray on the inside as well as the outside, but a more elegant solution is to purchase a purpose-built black case and transplant your computer's innards into it. It's certainly simpler than previous go-faster schemes - refrigerating your computer room, spreading peanut butter on your motherboard and so on.

If you try this out and get any results you'd like the world to know about, tell us! We await with bated breath some real-world tests of the theory.